Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice

"The book I did with Peter Senge builds on the research of others. The Handbook offers all the new research for those who are seriously interested in helping students develop and acquire these skills. I think it’s important this be empirically based. And changes we bring to something like children’s education must have sound research to back it up. That’s what the Handbook does. It pulls together all of that research, and it gives educators and educationists a better sense of what is really the most well-proven way to apply this science to education – because it’s still very new. I actually find the educational sector to be a little retrograde, particularly schools of education, the graduate schools that train teachers. There too is the problem of getting the curriculum changed, which is often tangled in bureaucracy. But the data presented in the Handbook shows that students not only learn better, but they also score better on academic achievement tests when they have social and emotional learning. They behave better. They pay more attention. Teachers generally are happy because they spend less time simply getting their students to sit still and pay attention."